The Hollywood Book of Death: The Bizarre, Often Sordid, Passings of More than 125 American Movie and TV Idols

by Parish, James Robert

  Jean Dorothy Seberg was born in 1938 in Marshalltown, Iowa. She was one of five children of pharmacist Edward Seberg Jr. and schoolteacher Dorothy (Benson) Seberg. As an adolescent, seeing Marlon Brando in The Men (1950) convinced her that she wanted to be an actress. As a teenager, Jean was in summer stock in Massachusetts and New Jersey and reluctantly attended the University of Iowa for a semester. She was among the regional candidates tested by Otto Preminger for St. Joan. Jean eventually won the coveted movie role, but her selection proved to be a nightmare for everyone. During production, Preminger tormented Jean for the very qualities that had made him hire her—her inexperience and ingenuousness. When it was finally released, the drama was badly panned, with much criticism leveled at Seberg’s inept performance. Nevertheless, the sadistic Preminger used Jean for his next movie, Bonjour Tristesse (1958).

  Actress Jean Seberg in the 1950s, before her career and life turned sour. Courtesy of JC Archives

  While making a film in France, Jean met attorney François Moreuil. They were married in September 1957 in her hometown; the union lasted less than two years. It was Moreuil, however, who introduced her to avant-garde moviemaker Jean-Luc Godard. Godard cast Jean in Breathless (1959) with Jean-Paul Belmondo. The New Wave picture was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and Jean received her share of recognition as well. She flew back and forth during the 1960s between Hollywood and European film projects.

  In 1963, the 25-year-old Seberg married Romain Gary, who was twice her age. They already had a son, Alexandre (nicknamed “Diego”), born in July 1962. Now that she was an international star, Seberg made one movie after another; one of her best roles was the schizophrenic title character of Lilith (1964), opposite Warren Beatty. Airport (1970) proved to be her last American-made feature.

  Years later, Gary would say that the FBI unfairly singled Jean out to be “neutralized” because of her open political support for radical left-wing groups, such as the Black Panthers. When Jean became pregnant in 1970, the FBI leaked a fake rumor to the Hollywood gossip columns that the baby’s father was a prominent Black Panther. Actually, Romain Gary—whom Jean was in the process of divorcing—was the father. Seberg was so traumatized by the reaction to this rumor, and the FBI’s continued harassment of her, that she attempted suicide with pills. This caused her to go into premature labor, and her Caucasian baby girl lived only two days after being born in August 1970. Both Gary and Seberg sued the publications that had picked up the damaging rumor, but they received only minimal damages for their legal efforts. Thereafter, according to Gary, each year on the anniversary of the baby’s birth, the continually depressed actress attempted suicide.

  Seberg made increasingly bad films in Europe throughout the first half of the 1970s, none of which added to her laurels. By then, she had developed a severe drinking problem that made her appear bloated at times. She married film director Dennis Berry in 1972, but they separated in 1978. The next year, she wed a young Algerian, Ahmed Hasni, in Paris. But because her divorce from Berry had never been official, the new marriage was not legal.

  Less than two weeks before her well-publicized disappearance, Jean attempted suicide at a French train station by throwing herself onto the tracks. Hasni, with whom she had been arguing, managed to rescue her in time. According to Hasni, he last saw Jean on August 30, 1979, when she left their Rue de Longchamps apartment naked under a blanket and carrying a bottle of barbiturates. Public pleas were issued for her to return home, but her many fans feared the worst. On September 8, Jean’s white Renault car was found on a street near her apartment. Her decomposing, naked body was lying on the back seat of the car. The autopsy determined she had overdosed fatally on a mixture of pills and alcohol and that her death had probably occurred on the night she left her apartment. The distraught actress left a farewell note for her son Diego:

  * * *

  Diego,

  My dear son, forgive me. I can’t live any longer. I can’t deal with a world that beats the weak, puts down the blacks and women, and massacres infants.

  Understand me, I know that you can, and you know that I love you. Be strong. Your mother who loves you.

  Jean

  * * *

  Jean was buried on September 14, 1979, at Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris. Her three ex-husbands and Ahmed Hasni were at the services, as was her Breathless costar, Jean-Paul Belmondo.

  To his dying day, Romain Gary insisted that the facts surrounding Seberg’s death suggested foul play. He cited as evidence the police’s discovery of a suitcase at Jean’s apartment containing her driver’s license (reported stolen months before), money, and her eyeglasses (which she needed for driving). He also noted that the alcohol level in her bloodstream had been medically determined to be higher than the point at which a person of her weight would become comatose. (Because no liquor bottles were found in her car, the police had ruled out the possibility that Jean had started drinking after she parked the car.) Years have passed and no satisfactory solution to the case has ever been reached.

  Since then, the mystique of Jean Seberg has continued to reverberate in public consciousness through published biographies and two offbeat 1995 films: Mark Rappaport’s thought-provoking biopic From the Journals of Jean Seberg, in which Mary Beth Hurt played Seberg, and the documentary Jean Seberg: American Actress, directed by Donatello Dubini and Fosco Dubin.

  Natalie Wood

  [Natasha Nikolaevna Zacharenko Gurdin]

  July 20, 1938–November 29, 1981

  When the doe-eyed beauty Natalie Wood died tragically in November 1981, it was a shocking coda to a most erratic life. Highly emotional both on and off camera, Natalie had undergone periods of great professional popularity and then stretches of relative career inactivity. Even her love life was highly charged; she married the same man, actor Robert Wagner, twice.

  There were also great ambiguities and contradictions concerning Natalie’s sudden death, which was officially designated an “accidental” drowning. To this day, the case remains puzzling, further clouded by the contradictory statements of the three men who were present on the night she died, especially the later theories of the boat’s captain.

  Natalie was born in San Francisco in 1938, the middle daughter of Russian immigrants Nikolai and Maria Kuleff (Zacharenko), who changed their surname to Gurdin when Nikolai became an American citizen. When Natalie was four, she and her mother were extras in Happy Land (1943), which filmed on location in northern California. Convinced her daughter had a potential screen career, the ambitious Maria moved the household to Los Angeles and changed Natasha’s name to Natalie Wood. Irving Pichel, who had directed Happy Land, remembered the expressive, bright youngster when he was casting Tomorrow Is Forever (1945) and gave her a key assignment. By the time she was nine, Natalie had costarred with Edmund Gwenn in Miracle on 34th Street (1947) and was sometimes able to earn a thousand dollars a week. For the rigidly controlled Natalie, it was not a happy period. “I spent practically all of my time in the company of adults. I was very withdrawn, very shy, I did what I was told and I tried not to disappoint anybody. I knew I had a duty to perform, and I was trained to follow orders.”

  One of Natalie’s more terrifying (and prophetic) moviemaking moments occurred during the making of The Star (1952), when the script called for the teenager to dive into the water. She was very apprehensive about deep water. (“I can swim a little,” she would say later in life, “but I’m afraid of water that is dark.”) The director informed the frightened Natalie that he would use a double, but at the last minute, he changed his mind and told Natalie to do the stunt herself. She went into hysterics, and thanks to the kind intervention of the movie’s star, Bette Davis, a double was employed for the shot.

  In the mid-1950s, the former child star went through an awkward adolescence with few screen prospects. But then, as the result of playing a mixed-up teenager in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) opposite James Dean, she was Oscar-nominated as Best Supporting Actress. Suddenly, Natalie was
a hot box-office property whose hectic romantic life included dating Elvis Presley and (rumor had it) stocky actor Raymond Burr. Her studio tried to manufacture an on- and offscreen romance between Natalie and Tab Hunter, her costar in The Burning Hills (1956) and The Girl He Left Behind (1956). In real life, however, she had fallen for the young actor and playboy Robert Wagner. They were married in Arizona at the Scottsdale Methodist Church on December 28, 1957

  Meanwhile, Natalie was shoved into big—but unsuccessful—movies like Marjorie Morningstar (1958). She and her husband teamed up for All the Fine Young Cannibals (1961), but by then, the couple’s highly promoted “dream marriage” had fallen apart. Their union was not strengthened by Natalie’s affair with Warren Beatty while the two of them were making a picture together. Natalie and Robert divorced in 1962; she was soon involved in another series of well-chronicled romances.

  In the early 1960s, Natalie blossomed into a major star. She was Oscar-nominated for both Splendor in the Grass (1961) and Love with the Proper Stranger (1962), and played the leads (although her singing was dubbed) in the musicals West Side Story (1961) and Gypsy (1962). But by the middle of the decade her career had slipped again, and she made no movies between 1966 and 1969. In May 1969, she wed British scriptwriter and agent Richard Gregson; their daughter, Natasha, was born in September 1970.

  Three faces of Natalie Wood, the star of Penelope (1966).

  Courtesy of JC Archives

  Her career rose briefly when she played one of the spouse-swapping characters in Bob Carol Ted Alice (1969). Then she announced her retirement, insisting, “Let’s face it, acting is not really important.” In the summer of 1971, she and Gregson filed for divorce, and a year later, she and Robert Wagner reunited aboard his yacht Rambling Rose, anchored off Catalina Island. (Between marriages to Natalie, Wagner had also married again and now had a child from that union.) Natalie and Robert had their own child, Courtney Brooke, in 1974.

  From the mid-1970s onward, Natalie’s best acting was done for TV. She and Wagner costarred in the TV movie The Affair (1973), and she was a guest on the 1979 pilot of his popular series Hart to Hart. When queried about her diminished screen career, Wood reasoned, “I am a woman, a wife, a mother, and a working actress, in that order.”

  In November 1981, Wood was costarring in Brainstorm and was scheduled to make her stage debut in a Los Angeles production of Anastasia, while Robert was launching his third season of Hart to Hart. But when William Holden, the one-time intimate of Wagner’s costar Stefanie Powers, died in a drunken fall on November 16, 1981, production on the TV show closed down while Powers coped with the tragedy. Robert spent several days comforting his costar, which did nothing to soothe the highly jealous Natalie.

  On Thanksgiving day, November 26, 1981, the Wagners hosted an informal party. One of the guests was Christopher Walken, Natalie’s Brainstorm costar, and (as some insisted) her new romantic interest. (For some reason, Walken’s wife had returned alone to her family in Connecticut.) Natalie invited Walken to enjoy Thanksgiving weekend with her and Wagner aboard their 55-foot cabin cruiser, the Splendour.

  On November 27, the trio boarded the yacht at Marina del Rey, skippered by a oneman crew, Dennis Davern; they headed for Catalina Island. That evening, after anchoring, the quartet came ashore to Avalon in the yacht’s dinghy, the Valiant. After dinner, because of rough waters, Wagner moved the yacht to a safer mooring. The others remained ashore at a hotel. The next day, November 28, they returned to the Splendour, now anchored at Isthmus Cove. At about 4:00 P.M., they went ashore in the dinghy for dinner. They remained at the restaurant, drinking several bottles of wine. Reportedly, Natalie was intoxicated and flirting with Walken.

  Back aboard the boat that evening, the skipper retired, while Natalie, Robert, and Christopher apparently continued the festivities in the main cabin. About midnight, Natalie left to change clothes. A few minutes later, at 12:20 A.M., Davern made his last rounds and noted that the dinghy, the Valiant, was gone. He assumed that Natalie must have taken the boat, as was her occasional custom, to view the evening stars. When she didn’t return in the next several minutes, a concerned Wagner began a search for her, using another dinghy. By 1:00 A.M. on November 29, Robert had requested the harbor patrol to scout for Natalie; at 3:26 A.M., the Coast Guard was added to the search party. Helicopters joined in the task. At 7:44 A.M. her body was found—floating facedown beneath the water’s surface some two hundred yards from the isolated Blue Cavern Point. The Valiant, with four life jackets aboard, was two hundred yards away. From the evidence, it appeared that she had never gone aboard the small craft that night. Because of scratches on her hands and wrists, it was concluded she had attempted to cling to the cove rocks before drowning.

  Police concluded that after changing clothes (at the time of her death, she was wearing a nightgown, knee-length socks, and a down jacket), Natalie had chosen to go out in the inflatable dinghy, perhaps to go to the hotel ashore. While untying it, however, she slipped, striking her cheek in the process, and then fell into the extremely cold water. She soon drowned, most likely dragged down by her water-soaked jacket.

  The Los Angeles County Coroner, Thomas T. Noguchi, was in charge of the well-publicized case. His investigation of the freak accident brought forth the speculation—refuted by some—that Wagner and Walken had argued that night, and Natalie had attempted to leave the boat to get away from the two antagonistic men. As Noguchi wrote in Coroner (1983), “There’s a lot of room left for further investigation.”

  There was one witness to Natalie’s heartrending death. A Los Angeles businesswoman whose own boat was anchored three hundred feet from the Splendour testified that around midnight, she heard a woman’s voice—sounding quite sober—shouting for help. Then she soon heard another voice respond, “Take it easy. We’ll be over to get you.” Thereafter, silence, and she assumed the matter had been resolved satisfactorily.

  Because of the events surrounding Natalie’s death, and the condition of her body upon recovery, it required a great deal of cosmetic work to make her presentable for viewing by family members and for the funeral. Natasha, Wood’s 11-year-old daughter, requested that diamond earrings be placed on her mother’s ears. A fox fur coat, a present Wagner hadn’t yet given his spouse, was also wrapped around Natalie’s body.

  Her gardenia-draped coffin was buried in Los Angeles at Westwood (Village) Memorial Park on December 2, 1981. A bronze plate on her simple marker reads “Natalie Wood Wagner.” Among the celebrities attending her funeral were Fred Astaire, Rock Hudson, Laurence Olivier, Gregory Peck, and Elizabeth Taylor, as well as Christopher Walken and Stefanie Powers. Three of Natalie’s best friends—Hope Lange, Roddy McDowall, and author/screenwriter Tommy Thompson—delivered eulogies. Father Stephen Fitzgerald (of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Holy Virgin Mary) officiated.

  In her will, Natalie requested Wagner be appointed guardian of Natasha, her daughter with Richard Gregson, so her three children would be raised together. She left $15,000 to her stepsister, Olga Viripaeff; and all her clothing and furs to her sister, Lana Wood. Much of her jewelry, works of art, and household furnishings were bequeathed to Wagner, as well as a portion of her residual estate. The balance of the estate was to be held in trust for her parents and her children.

  After being shelved for several months, Brainstorm finally was completed, working around Natalie’s unfinished scenes. When released in 1983, it was a sad anticlimax to her lengthy acting career. And 11 years after the drowning, Christopher Walken would finally speak about the tragic event. He told the New York Times, “It all sounds so mysterious, but it wasn’t. She was small. . . [the dinghy] was slippery. She fell. She hit her head. She went into the water. That’s what happened.”

  A few years before her death, Natalie Wood was asked what she thought she would be like when she grew old. She replied, “I don’t really think that far ahead.”

  Suicides

  Hillside Memorial Park in Los Angeles, California © 2001 by
Albert l,. Ortega

  Pier Angeli

  [Anna Maria Pierangeli]

  June 19, 1932–September 10, 1971

  In the early 1950s, it seemed that Sardinian-born Pier Angeli had an extremely promising show-business future. After making two well-received Italian movies, she was signed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to play the sensitive Italian bride of a G.I. in Teresa (1951). The five-foot, one-hundred-pound, raven-haired Anna Maria and her twin sister Marisa Luisa (who became screen actress Marisa Pavan) were brought to Hollywood, where Pier (her new screen name) was elected a Star of Tomorrow by the Motion Picture Herald trade magazine. However, her film assignments at the still-lustrous MGM studio were unspectacular, and she began dating (with much fanfare) an array of Hollywood notables, including Kirk Douglas, James Dean, and Vic Damone. It was Damone, the Brooklyn-born Italian singer also under MGM contract, whom she wed in 1954. Their son Perry was born in 1955. The next year—during which she suffered a miscarriage—Pier enjoyed her best screen assignment, as the soulful wife of boxing champ Rocky Graziano (played by Paul Newman) in the popular Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956).

  By 1957, Pier and Vic—always a combative couple—had separated. The following year, Pier, who had never been comfortable with screen stardom, made her final MGM picture, Danny Kaye’s costume comedy Merry Andrew (1958). Her divorce from Damone became final in 1959; he blamed her domineering, widowed mother for most of their troubles. The next several years were spent in court, as Pier and Vic battled ferociously for custody of their son.

  In 1962, Pier, whose screen career had dimmed badly, married the much older Italian bandleader Armando Travajoli. Soon after their son was born in 1963, however, the couple separated. The distraught Pier now admitted publicly, “I am still in love, deeply and eternally, with Jimmy Dean.” (Dean’s business manager, Pier’s mother, and MGM had all disapproved strongly of the couple’s relationship. Dean died in a car crash in 1955.)